Be sure to read our latest SSD article: The SSD Relapse for an updated look at the SSD market.

The Prelude

I spent about three weeks working on my review of Intel’s X25-M SSD. Most of that was research and writing and re-writing to not only review the product but also to talk about the rest of the SSDs in the marketplace and their deficiencies. Truth be told, I spent more time working on SSDs that weren’t the X25-M than the Intel drive itself. The Intel drive just worked as it should, the rest of them didn’t.

If you read the article, you know I was pretty harsh on some of the SSDs out at the time and if you’ve ever used any of those SSDs, you know why. Needless to say, there was some definite fallout from that review. I’m used to negative manufacturer response after a GPU review, but I’m always a bit surprised when it happens in any other segment.

I took a day or two off after that review went live, I think it was a day. Afterwards, I immediately started working on a follow-up. There was a strange phenomenon a few people noticed, something I unfortunately picked up on after the review went live; if you filled the X25-M up and re-benchmarked it, it got slower. And I had no idea why.

A few weeks later, I had it figured out. But then Nehalem was right around the corner. I’d tackle it after that. But then a new batch of SSDs from OCZ and other vendors were almost ready. I told myself I’d do them all at the same time. Then CES happened.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

If you look at the SSD market today, you’d assume that it’s very different from what it was just six months ago when the X25-M launched. People are worried that the Intel drive has issues with degrading performance over time. Some vendors are now shipping “revised” JMicron drives with multiple controllers, supposedly fixing all of the problems I talked about last year.

I hate to break it to you guys. As different as the world may seem today, it’s all very much the same.

The Intel drive is still the best of the best. Yes, it, and other SSDs do get slower over time and later in this article I’ll explain why it happens and why it’s not as big of a deal as you’d think. The issues I complained about with the JMicron drives from last year are still alive and well today; they’re just somewhat occluded.

Delay after delay kept me from writing this article, but I believe it’s for the best. What went in to what you’re about to read is nearly six months of research, testing and plain old work with SSDs.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect. We’re about to see a new wave of SSDs hit the market and it’s time to separate the fact from the fiction, the benchmarks from reality and the men from the boys. The last time I wrote an article about SSDs I ruffled quite a few feathers. That’s never my aim, but we’ll see what comes of this one.

It's too bad Windows and applications don't let you select where all the data that needs to be updated and saved to is stored. If that was an option a SSD could be used to only load data (EXE files and support files) and a HDD could be used to store files that are updated frequently, like a web browser for example, their constantly caching files, from the sound of this article that would kill the performance of a SSD in no time.

I bought a Vertex 120GB and it is NOT working on my Nvidia chipsets motherboard. Anyone met the same problem? I tried intel chipsets motherboard and seems ok.
I used HDtach to test the read/write performance 4 days ago, wow, it was amazing. 160MB/s in write. But today I felt it slower and used HDtach to test again, it downs to single digit MB per second. Can I recover it or I need to return it? Reply

While I must admit I skipped over some of the more technical bits where SSD was explained in detail, I read the summaries and I've gotta admit this article was extremely helpful. I've been wanting to get one of these for a long time now but they've seemed too infantile in technological terms to put such a hefty investment in, until now.

After reading about OCZ's response to you and how they've stepped it up and are willing to cut unimportant statistics in favor of lower latencies, I actually decided to purchase one myself. Figured I might as well show my appreciation to OCZ by grabbing up a 60GB SSD, not to mention it looks like it's by far the best purchase I can make SSD-wise for $200.

Thanks for the awesome article, was a fun read, that's for sure. Reply

Anand, I don't want to sound too negative in my comments. While I wouldn't call them unusable, there's no doubt that the random write performance of the JMicron SSDs sucks. I'm glad that you're actually running random I/O tests when so many other websites just run HDTune and call it a day.

Something crossed my mind when I saw the firmware-based trade-off between random writes and sequential transfer rates: couldn't that be adjusted dynamically to get the best of both worlds? Default to the current behaviour but switch into something resembling te old one when extensive sequential transfers are detected?

Of course this neccesiates that the processor would be able to handle additional load and that the firmware changes don't involve permanent changes in the organization of the data.

Maybe the OCZ-Team already thought about this and maybe nobody's going to read this post, buried deep within the comments..